Grease
by savvyliterate
Summary: Luke could speak nothing but moron these days, but he could show Lorelai in every touch, every kiss, every gasp and sigh, just how happy she made him.


**Author's note:** There was a story in the Washington Post this morning about how people are stealing used grease from restaurants to sell to the biofuel industry. It leap-frogged into an exercise in writing Luke and wanting to touch on the 6-month wedding anniversary people are noting on Twitter and Tumblr.

* * *

 _"Grease"_

When Luke answered the front door at 3:47 a.m., he was utilizing every hard-won ounce of self-control not to yell at the person on the other side. When the knock came, when he looked out the window and saw the red and blue flashing strobe light in front of the house, his brain immediately flashed to Lorelai filling in as the night manager at the Dragonfly Inn, to April on her post-graduation hiking trip in the Poconos, to Rory in London trying to figure things out with Logan.

Naturally, he feared the worst.

He listened. He nodded. He thanked Coop and agreed to meet with him in a few minutes. Neither man mentioned he had answered the door wearing a T-shirt and boxers with baseball bats scattered across them.

When Coop left, Luke took a moment just to sit on the couch and let his heart rate return to normal. Paul Anka nudged his knee, and he absently patted the elderly dog's head.

"We're never telling anyone about this," he informed him. "Got it?"

Paul Anka merely yawned.

He shook his head ruefully, annoyed with himself. He absently worried his wedding ring as his thoughts then switched to the news Coop had actually come to deliver.

"Grease?"

* * *

The butt-crack of dawn found Luke, Coop, and Cesar all standing around the damaged blue dumpster in the back of the diner property that was specifically for waste grease from the fryer. They looked at the shattered pieces of the lock on the ground and peered into the now empty container.

"So," Cesar said, "all of this because someone took a bunch of hoses and siphoned out old fry grease? I mean, what use is that? There's a whole building's worth of more valuable stuff right there."

"Don't give 'em any ideas." Luke shoved his hands in his pockets. "It gets turned into biofuel."

Cesar and Coop stared at him like he'd suddenly grown another head.

Luke gave a little shrug. "Rory did some piece on it about five years ago or so." Geez, it was framed and hanging on the diner wall. Did no one read it? "You haul it away, sell it to a refinery, get paid a little money for it. It adds up."

"How much does your tank hold?" Coop asked.

Had Lorelai been there, a "dirty" would be floating through the air. "314 gallons. Gets emptied once a month. The next pickup is tomorrow."

"Not more often?" Coop scribbled notes down in the small pad he held.

Luke rolled his eyes. "Taylor."

"Ah." It really did explain everything. Even after two decades, Luke still had to put up with Taylor griping every month about the grease disposal truck when it came through town.

"How much you think that grease is worth?" Cesar asked.

The men stared at the empty dumpster for a few more seconds, then all of them pulled out their phones to check.

* * *

$50.

$50 freaking dollars of grease.

Luke trudged up the lane, preferring to make the trek from the center of town to the Dragonfly Inn on foot. The half-mile walk was good for clearing his head. What a morning. Not even 6 a.m. and he was dealing with some ass breaking the lock on his dumpster and stealing $50 in grease. Hell, he'd have given it to the person if they'd just asked. Wasn't any skin off his back, and he certainly didn't have any use for it. It was going to cost him more to replace the locks and repair the dumpster than the grease was even worth.

He pushed open the well-oiled hinges of the Dragonfly's front door and had to grin. There she was, his wife of six months and the love of his life, asleep with her head resting on the front desk and drooling just a bit.

Of course he fished his phone out and took a photo.

Lorelai startled at the sound of the small click, and Luke quickly shoved it back in his pocket as she blinked sleepy eyes at him. "Coffee," she slurred and rested her head back on the desk with a thump.

He set it just out of her reach. "How'd the night shift go?"

"Long. Boring. Coffee." She stretched out her hand, her fingertips not even grazing the paper cup. "Mean. Push it closer."

He nudged it a hair's breadth closer. Her fingertips brushed the side of the cup.

"This is cruel," Lorelai muttered into the polished wood. "Goes against the marriage vows."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes it does. Love, honor, cherish, and provide Lorelai with coffee."

"And there's your coffee."

"In my hand."

"You can reach for it."

She all but snarled at him and made a desperate grab for the cup.

Luke drove the Jeep back to town when Michel arrived 10 minutes later, not trusting Lorelai to drive in her current condition, and told her about the break-in.

"Grease? Really, if they want stuff, just break into the soda shoppe. Rory and I think Taylor's hiding gold under the floorboards," Lorelai said as they drove through town.

"He better not be. Those are _my_ floorboards."

Lorelai perked up. "Hey, does that make it your gold?"

"There's no gold beneath any of the floorboards in Stars Hollow."

"You don't know that."

"Remember the time Kirk decided to go through every inch of town with a metal detector?"

"Ah," Lorelai said with a sage nod. "The Great Scavenger Hunt of 2012. That was a particularly inventive suggestion you gave when you kicked him out of the diner for doing that."

Luke just sighed.

"Did I mention you were really sexy doing it?"

His interest piqued. "Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah." She waggled her eyebrows as he pulled into the drive at the house. "I'm getting really nice flashbacks just thinking about it."

"Far be it from me not to indulge in your flashbacks." Luke all but hauled Lorelai into the house as she laughed.

* * *

The grease theft was dismissed as a one-off crime, the locks were replaced, the dumpster was repaired, and life went on for another few days when it happened again.

At least this time Coop didn't bother waking Luke up in the middle of the night.

Not that he was sleeping much.

"You look terrible, babe," Lorelai said when he hung up the phone with the grease disposal company to arrange another dumpster. This time, repairing wouldn't save it. She peered over her coffee mug. "You're not sleeping well. You toss and turn so much I wonder if you've taken up sleep swing dancing."

"I'm fine," Luke snapped.

"Is the grease thing really bothering you that much?"

"No." He walked out to the truck rather than deal with more questions. He yanked open the door and regretted being so short with Lorelai. He stared at the house. He knew exactly why he wasn't sleeping. He just didn't want to cop to it.

* * *

After the third grease theft and 10 days of next to no sleep, Lorelai appeared in the diner wearing a tweed cape, a deerstalker's hat, and smoking a pipe. Thankfully, not a real one. Bubbles gently wafted from the bowl of the plastic toy before popping on the edge of the napkin holder.

"What the hell are you doing?" Luke asked.

"I wanted to get you out of your grease funk, so I'm taking on the case."

"Lorelai, it's not a huge-"

"I'm Sherlock Holmes." Lorelai did a perfect little pirouette, a souvenir of dance lessons hammered into her when she was a child in Hartford. "I had a choice between this and the movie _Grease_ , but the Danny and Sandy thing didn't seem to fit."

"Your Watson's in London."

"Yes, but not my backup Watson," Lorelai boasted as the diner door opened and April bounced in dressed in the same outfit.

"Hi, Dad!"

His wife and his daughter in cahoots. Luke wondered if it was grounds for an all-points bulletin or evacuation to an air raid shelter. "Oh no. You two aren't becoming amateur sleuths. _Law & Order _isn't ready for either of you. Just let the police do its job."

"But I know how to catch the person," April said.

"That four years of school I helped pay for wasn't so the two of you could sit in the car all night, consume six gallons of coffee, and try to catch some grease thief. No stakeouts."

Lorelai and April both looked miserable.

"Geez, you two," Luke said.

"Actually," April said, "there's a better way of capturing whoever's doing it." And she pulled a webcam out of her messenger. "This is what came of those four years of college you helped pay for."

* * *

Luke arrived home that night to find Lorelai and April with a giant spread of food covering every available surface in the living room. There was even a couple of Mallomars perched precariously on Paul Anka's back.

"What is this?" he asked.

"Grease thief catching party," Lorelai explained, still dressed in her Sherlock Holmes outfit. "Look, April has this Chromecast thing and is putting the feed up on the TV."

"Unbelievable. I officially want no part of this."

"Suit yourself. More food for us."

Luke didn't notice the side-eye look Lorelai gave him as he trudged into the kitchen for Tylenol.

"Except Dad eats the food none of us will eat. Oh wait." April stole the whole bowl of cherry tomatoes. "Mine!"

Luke walked downstairs at 3 a.m. to find Lorelai and April curled up together on the couch asleep, Paul Anka nestled between them.

On the TV was an excellent shot of the grease dumpster with locks broken again.

He sighed and went back to bed to continue not sleeping.

* * *

The next night, he showed up at the Dragonfly just after midnight with coffee, his pillow and a spare blanket.

"April's watching it again," Luke announced, bypassing Lorelai gaping at him at the front desk to go in her office. Only a couple more nights of filling in for the night manager, and he'd get her back home for the foreseeable future. Not that he was counting the days or anything.

Lorelai put out the bell and a sign for any wayward guests that might be looking for assistance, then followed him into the office. "What is with you? You've been acting so strange since that grease thief started confusing the diner for a 7-11."

Luke dropped the pillow on one end of the couch, then sat down to pull off his boots. "I keep telling you, it's not the damn grease!"

"Than what is it?"

Not talking about it, he repeated to himself. He put the boots aside and took off his hat. "Look, I'm just gonna crash on the couch in your office."

Lorelai just stared at him as if an alien had swooped in and replaced him with a clone. "We have a bed at home. We have multiple beds upstairs. Let me give you a room key." She leaned down to thread her hand through his hair, and he flinched away. He regretted it the second he did it and wished he could erase the hurt in her eyes.

"Couch is fine," Luke muttered, feeling guiltier by the second. No matter what he did, he kept behaving like an ass around Lorelai, and he couldn't seem to find the off button.

"You're being obstinate, even for you."

He turned pleading eyes to her. "Please, just … let me do this."

She opened her mouth to say something. Closed it. In her very best impression of Emily Gilmore, she lifted her chin. "Very well, suit yourself."

* * *

Luke woke up with a blanket tucked around him and Lorelai watching him thoughtfully from her desk.

"You slept better," she observed.

"Yeah." It felt like he had at least.

"Need to go in this morning?"

"No, Cesar's got it."

"Then come upstairs with me." She dangled a key from her index finger.

Lorelai had gone home at some point while he slept, because an overnight bag was sitting on the desk that was under the window.

"OK," she told him. "Now, we're not going home until you can manage to stop speaking moron. I have Googled everything I could about this, and I know you're not supposed to listen to WebMD, but apparently this is some territorial thing. And what this guy or guys is doing is violating your territory, so …"

"For God's sake, _Lorelai_." Luke nearly roared her name. "I keep telling you it's not about the damn grease!"

"Then what is it? I can't read your mind!" Lorelai's eyes filled with panic. "It's us, isn't it? You're not happy."

He just stared at her. "What?"

"Six months," Lorelai rambled, beginning to pace. "We've been married six months and you're …"

Oh no, this had to stop right now. He intercepted her, grabbing her arms. "No! No! I'm happy! What part of I'm never gonna leave did you miss last year?"

"Then tell me what's wrong, Luke!" But her words were drowned out as he moved in and kissed her desperately, horrified at himself for making her think for even a second that he would want to leave her. Desperate kissing led to desperate shedding of clothes and nearly missing the bed as they fell on it. He could speak nothing but moron these days, but he could show her in every touch, every kiss, every gasp and sigh, just how happy she made him.

He rested his forehead against her shoulder after, her hand stroking his back. He needed to move, but he didn't want to let go of her. Reluctantly, he rolled onto his back and staring at the ceiling. The fan lazily spun in a circle.

"It's stupid," he confessed.

"Yes, you're being really stupid," Lorelai agreed.

He bit his lip and hoped she wouldn't think less of him. "When Coop came that first night, I thought something had happened to you."

"Oh. Oh, Luke."

"So stupid," he berated himself. "If not you, then Rory or April, and it never occurred to me it would be something so idiotic like a guy swiping grease from behind the diner. Just can't seem to shake it. Every time I sleep, I keep reliving that night but instead, something's happened to you." Saying the words, even the thought of them, made panic well in his chest.

"Hey." Lorelai rolled on top of him, framing his face between her hands. He really hoped he looked calmer than he felt. "Not going anywhere."

"It took us so long to …"

"I know," she whispered and kissed him. "This has been the best six months of my life too. Which means they were really amazing because the 10 years with you before that were the best years of my life. And the two we had together before that. It's not going away. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Body bags, remember? I'm getting his-and-hers matching ones. They look like 90s jogging suits."

For the first time in two weeks, Luke laughed.

* * *

While Luke and Lorelai were sleeping and making love, April was catching the grease thief. She happily pocketed the reward, which would go a long way toward establishing her new apartment in D.C. for graduate school.

"The camera got jostled around so I couldn't see them actually swiping the grease, but I got the license number of the truck," she boasted the next day as she devoured all of her favorites off the menu, taking full advantage of being spoiled by her father. Lorelai also made out like a bandit, and his girls chatted over plates of chili fries.

"All this mess over grease," Cesar said from the kitchen. "So stupid."

"No, Kirk," Luke was saying as Cesar chatted with April and Lorelai lazily blew bubbles with her pipe, "this is finished. You can't start your own business picking up where those biofuel thieves left off."

"I am willing to cut you in on the profits," Kirk suggested.

"It's $50 worth of grease. All of you just get over it!"

That night, Luke slept like a baby.


End file.
